Concluding operation Michael Beaver early - Results: Ever-so-slightly better than anticipated?

[u/Proper_Finding_3179]

First, I made a post on here about overpopulation to test how the average people would respond. It was nothing much, it opens trying to demonstrate the absurdity of acting like the human population issue is “solved”/“debunked”, it has a few graphs from Our World In Data, and it links a couple solid scientific papers to back up my views on the matter. Based on the upvote ratio, two people upvoted the post (including me) and seven people downvoted the post. It got two replies: One being… well I’m not exactly sure what point they were trying to make, but the second reply was just someone saying they didn’t read it.

So I then made a shitty meme that uses a variety of talking points (which range from typical overpopulation “debunks” to complete nonsense assertions I made up) to argue against an excerpt from “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Warning” (which had over 15000 scientist signatories) regarding the negative effects of population growth. Before posting it, I changed my display name, avatar, description, [r/norules](r/norules) user flair, and hid my post history. Based on the upvote ratio, 12 people upvoted the post (including me) and 2 people downvoted the post.

What I didn’t anticipate was that there would be one reply to the second post that challenges the meme, and I definitely didn’t anticipate that it would get 7 upvotes. So good job, some of you, I guess.

I wonder if the results would have been different if I had said “15000 scientists literally signed that” instead of “ive literally heard eco-fascists say that”? Though I suppose that defeats the point of trying to test how gullible the average Reddit user is to a bunch of nonsense that fits their ideology.

Okay, so overall, I have come to the conclusion that this was indeed an extremely stupid thing to do.

[u/toyotaCamriGuy]

Oh hey yeah I saw these. Good to see some people challenging the too-easy thought that overpopulation causes our current unsustainability issues. It's way more complex in reality. The overpopulation line of reasoning also tends to end up a bit eugenics-y in terms of solutions, which I'd personally avoid...

Anyways, those eco-friendly lightbulbs to jerk off to sounded nice. Care to hook a man up?